Seagate’s Drive Plans Include 500 GBs, Encryption

Share This article

Seagate Technology unveiled its 2005 lineup on Wednesday, which takes drives to the half-terabyte level and introduces a product family that encrypts data.

Over the course of the year, Seagate will unveil twelve new products, executives said, incorporating the company’s shift to perpendicular recording, a technique of aligning the magnetic grains within the drive to increase its storage density.

That technology will have far-reaching effects, as Seagate transitions its Barracuda desktop and external drives to a top capacity of 500 Gbytes and increases its Momentus line of 2.5-inch drives to 160 Gbytes. A spokeswoman for Maxtor Corp. also said the company plans 500-GB drives, a tactic likely to be followed by the rest of the hyper-competitive drive industry.

However, Seagate’s rethinking of some of its standard product categories may also see Seagate pushing into new markets. By removing some of the ruggedizing features from its Momentus 2.5-inch line, for example, Seagate plans to introduce the LD25, a 2.5-inch drive designed for small-form-factor but relatively fixed environments, such as televisions and game consoles. Conversely, by improving the drive’s ability to withstand shock and heat, Seagate plans to ship the EE25, a series of drives specifically targeted at cars, especially in-dash GPS systems, as well as the military.

“Today, people are using storage as part of their everyday life, in PDAs, MP3 players, and PVRs,” said Rob Pait, Seagate’s director of global consumer electronics marketing, in an interview. “Customers are buying add-on storage for PCs and demanding more storage reliability for their PCs. Backing up today is not about saving Excel files, backing up today means preserving family memories…more and more, people are realizing that I can do anything with that storage – and if I want to, if I want more, I can buy it really easily.”

Seagate, the largest disk-drive manufacturer, has seen a steady increase in demand for its notebook drives as demand for notebooks PCs has also increased. Seagate plans to deliver a formal mid-quarter update on Friday, although analysts said they believe Seagate’s notebook’s presence has been strong.

“Our checks indicate that the last four weeks have seen extremely strong demand for mobile drives and note that Seagate could see additional upside during the quarter from this trend,” said Les Santiago, an analyst at Wall Street house Piper Jaffray, in a note to clients sent Tuesday.

However, Seagate plans to enhance its Momentus lineup further with the Momentus FDE, a 2.5-inch drive with the capability to encrypt is data. Encrypting the information will make a stolen notebook less valuable to thieves, as well as preventing identity theft and the loss of sensitive corporate data, Pait said.

The FDE drive is OS-independent, and will require the user to enter some form of identifier to unlock the drive – possibly a password or biometric key, although the level of security is up to the OEM, Pait said. The drive’s key will be placed on a hidden portion of the drive, and will also require a check with the host system to verify identity. The encryption scheme used will be a “4C” method, Pait said, apparently the one designed by 4C Entity LLC to allow data access only by the approved system, in much the same way digital music files may be restricted to certain playback devices.

The standard Momentus drives are also used in Seagate’s “portable” external hard drive, meaning that the category will also see an increase in capacity to 120 Gbytes. Pait did not say whether the encryption capability would be added to the external drives, however.

Finally, Seagate plans to increase its 1-inch drives up to an 8-Gbyte level, almost certainly signaling the introduction of Apple iPod minis and related music players based on the drive in 2005 or early 2006. The drives will ship with two interfaces: the standard ATA interface for integration into OEM devices, as well as a new CompactFlash interface so that the drives may be sold at retail for the first time, Pait said.

“That’s a big market there, portable music players, and we do not see any abatement in this market at this time,” Pait said. As the drive capacities ramp up, the new drive, dubbed the CompactFlash Photo Hard Drive, will also be used in devices with multimedia capabilities as well, he said.

Seagate’s roadmap does not show any network-attached storage, however, as rival Western Digital did when it revealed some its own product plans in May.

Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Copyright 1996-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC.PCMag Digital Group All Rights Reserved. ExtremeTech is a registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis, LLC. is prohibited.